Sarah Vowell: biography and literary analysis

Sarah Vowell

Guns, Presidents, and Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation

Travel writing as a genre has become somewhat problematic in the post-modern, politically correct era. When traveling to other places, travel writers have grown increasingly sensitive to the fact that they must avoid gawking at other cultures and viewing other ways of life as exotic, even if native practices may seem strange to an outsider's eye. This is true of traveling abroad but also recounting different ways of life in different regions of the United States. In her book Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell views the tourist attractions featuring relics from presidential history with a wry eye, particularly those individuals obsessed with artifacts of the past. She is both alternately attracted and repelled by this aspect of American culture and America's way of remembering their recent and distant past. At times, her tone lapses into pure irony, but the historical figures themselves she views with respect, however kitsch and cliched the museums that commemorate great and mediocre presidents alike may seem at times. Even traveling through time as well as place the past can seem like a different country, a country that Vowell treats with a mix of humor and respect. Thus in her book, Vowell takes the literary vehicle of the travel genre, and uses it to travel through cultural time as well as space, examining the way that Americans have viewed presidential history over the years and musing the way we view the past reveals our nature as Americans.

According to Vowell, many of the former political controversies of American history have been reduced to artifacts and curios, denuded of their original significance in museums. The memories of presidents become memorials and museums rather than true encapsulations men who enacted policy, good and bad. Of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis she notes that a Richmond tour guide at the White House of the Confederacy informed her that Jefferson's bed was so short "because most people back then slept sitting up" but not how "Davis could sleep at all given the fact that he was waging a war to keep human beings enslaved" and a guide at Andrew Jackson's old home is more apt to talk about the wallpaper than Jackson's legacy in creating the 'Trail of Tears' by expelling Native Americans from their land (Vowell 2005, p.54). Despite its many cultural changes, despite the fact that an African-American is running for President of the United States, America still suffers the legacy of the Civil War in its seismic racial, regional, and economic divides yet a tour of the presidency reduces the Confederacy to quaint anecdotes. A memorial to Jackson ignores the complicated legacy of American native-white relations in relation to a beloved past president. The focus at most of these attractions is on 'human interest' riffs rather than real history, on the entertainment and theme park aspect of history. What does the fact that the pear tree of Peter Stuyvesant, the founder of New Amsterdam really reveal about the real reasons for the founding of New York and the founding of America, when one can purchase chewing gum from a vendor only steps away? (Vowell 159)

The primary focus of Assassination Vacation is presidential assassinations and the way they are remembered in a physical and commemorative fashion through memorials, beginning with Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. The fourth president who was assassinated, John F. Kennedy, is not touched upon in as great detail, perhaps because people's memories of Kennedy, Vowell feels, are too fresh and also because of its relatively recent nature has made it less of a focus for the tourist industry -- it seems less long ago and far away (Walla 2005, p.1). Vowell, one reviewer wrote: "To reanimate moments lost to history, to find their resonances in contemporary American culture and her own life, she seeks out the material artifacts that have survived those moments: fragments of Lincoln's skull and the bullet that shattered it; a tile from the train station floor where James Garfield was standing when his assailant shot him... Museums and tourist spots often seem like dead, airless places, as flat and static as postcards, but Vowell makes you realize that they, and history itself, is a lot more dynamic than that"(Beato C3). By reducing the past to an artifact and the president to a body the past can seemingly be experienced in a controlled fashion. However, history can never be entirely encapsulated in such a manner entirely, in Vowell's retelling, as the significance of the even always seeps out, whether we like it or not, as her fascination with the habits and legacy of the dead grows, from the greatness of Lincoln to Garfield's idiosyncrasies, like the latter's book collection (Vowell 134).

True, she may sometimes feel unsatisfied, such as when she visits a Lincoln museum in Springfield, Illinois, that the experience falls short of the anticipation. Her craving for the real Lincoln remains and continues to compel her to seek out more representations of the past, even though she may be looking to satisfy some moral need deep within herself more than to know the 'real' man. The sight of a makeshift memorial to Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth is a potent reminder to Vowell that the past still has a hold upon the present, and that it matters to people. The men of the Civil War still have symbolic value that translates into reverence for material objects.

Of course, Vowell comes across plenty of dust in her travels -- some museum curators literally become curios or artifacts themselves, entombed in their own museums like the bits and pieces of the presidential corpses, or the corpses of their killers, the popularity and mere existence of such attractions is testimony to "the innumerable eccentric ways that people manage to squeeze personal and civic meaning out of a world framed by pop culture, with all its predictable uniformity and leavening quirks" a quirkiness that Vowell embraces, even while she satirizes it (Tumber BW12). Although when we look at the past we may be revealing more about our present needs than history itself, Vowell also provides perspective and context to what we might call purely contemporary attitudes. She learns that long-term presence of such the gruesome play-by-play and "horrible violation" of the dying is not a unique one. "Crowds gathered at newspaper and telegraph offices to await the icky medical bulletins emanating from what turned out to be Garfield's deathbed. One day, for instance, the world learned he had had a 'free discharge of healthy-looking pus.' And after he finally left this mortal coil, the poor man suffered one last invasion of privacy: his spine, removed during autopsy, was passed around to jurors during the trial of his assassin, a delusional man who had been haunting the White House and the State Department in hopes of being named ambassador to France"(Handy 2005). This is, observes Bruce Handy of the New York Times is indicative of the fact that our modern fascination with the gory details of assassination, death, and gossip is not so modern after all, even while the political significance of the assassinations may seem remote. There maybe something to learn from historical tourism, if only that macabre act of assassination provokes a kind of contempt as well as reverence.

Vowell seems to manifest a contradictory attitude towards her subject. One peculiarity of Vowell's narrative is that she always stresses the strangeness of her obsession, in contrast to her friends who occasionally accompany her on her journey. Surely if her obsession was so strange, she would be the only one making pilgrimages to such places, and such warehouses of trivia would not exist? At other times, she can seem needlessly flip, even when discussing her reverent feelings for Lincoln, such as when she observes how John Wilkes Booth, whom she calls the George Clooney of the 19th century American stage, had a level of celebrity protected him from scrutiny and enabled him to freely travel from North to South, despite his known Confederate sympathies. She deadpans how terrorist might use a similar cover to evade detection (Vowell 29).

Vowell's evident affection for the presidents whose lives she chronicles prevents her from seemingly completely cynical and irreverent. She praises Abraham Lincoln expresses a bookish kind of kinship with Garfield and shows she is hardly unpatriotic in her feelings for these men. Her acknowledgement of the complicated legacy of slavery in America also indicates that she is not an uncritical patriot but Vowell seems more willing to criticize those who have an 'America right or wrong' attitude than to deflate the ideal of America itself. This reflects the fact that Vowell first got her notoriety writing and producing segments for the largely liberal, albeit publically-funded media source NPR (National Public Radio). Her earliest writings recount her experiences as a leftist daughter of a conservative family and father. "We hear about the precocious childhood, reading the Grapes of Wrath and hating Ronald Reagan in a family of gun-toting Republicans... [of] her father, a gunsmith, she writes...'All he ever cared about were guns. All I ever cared about was art'" (Martin 2000). Vowell's anti-gun politics and assassination fascination thus may have a personal dimension -- in the act of remembering violent American history, Vowell comes to terms with her past although retains her liberal politics.

Vowell does tie the issues raised by violence and assignations in the past to present-day attitudes Regarding one unwitting casualty in the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, Reagan's press secretary James Brady who must spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair due to his injury, Vowell is proud that she is part of their campaign and writes how moved she is: "that he and his wife, Sarah, turned this rotten luck into the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence is downright heroic. And not the soft-focus treacle that 'heroic' often implies. I'm on their mailing list" (Vowell 84). Unbelievably, she notes, two years after an attempt was made upon his life, Ronald Reagan still addressed the NRA convention. Brady, she points out, is striving to keep guns away from madmen and terrorists, unlike Republicans who clothe themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism combined with the rhetoric of guns.